White Australia is coming for you

In his new book Between the World and Me, the American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses the experience of whiteness. ‘My experience in this world,’ he says, ‘has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic – an orc, troll or gorgon. … There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.’

There are no racists in Australia, either.

Earlier this week, a West Coast fan who told Goodes to ‘get back to the zoo’ explained that he wasn’t racist. No, he said, the comment was ‘off-the-cuff banter’ and the concern about the persistent booing of an outspoken Indigenous star was – you guessed it! – ‘political correctness gone mad’. Indeed, it was the white fan who was the real victim, not Goodes.

‘I was the one humiliated by the over-the-top security, ordered out of my seat, spoken to like I was a criminal,’ he said.

‘There are basically two communities where I live – the whites and the Aborigines who are stuck in the 1700s,’ Hall says. ‘They harass women. They have carried out rapes, burglaries, assaults. It’s got to the stage now that we, the public, are having to do something about it and that’s why the AVF has been set up.’

And what does the AVF plan to do?

Hall says he and his men will ‘kneecap’ housebreakers, drug dealers and rapists.

‘The organisation will carry out punishment beatings and shootings if needs be, and by that I mean kneecappings,’ he explained, before adding. ‘That is obviously a last resort, the AVF would prefer to limit itself to tarring and feathering but is prepared to take things further if necessary.’

Of course, Hall is not a racist, either.

‘Race plays no part in who the organisation targets,’ he says. ‘The Aborigines carry out their own form of punishment beatings by spearing the kneecap of someone who has wronged them. I don’t see what the big fuss is about the AVF doing similar.’

Burgess also performs with a band called Eureka Brigade, an outfit responsible for such charming ditties as ‘Border Patrol’ and ‘ADL Killing Machine’. In his capacity as lyricist, Burgess once celebrated the Cronulla riots of 2005 as ‘Australia’s Muslim holocaust’.

‘We are going to return to where it all started,’ he now says, ‘the very motherland of anti-Islam.’

Finally, in other non-racist news, Andrew Bolt has been busy posting clips of Martin Luther King speeches. He’s running a campaign against the ‘race war’ in the AFL, a war conducted, not by the booing fans, but by Adam Goodes, who seems to be singlehandedly oppressing all of Australia’s white football followers.

Yes, that’s right. You see, MLK had a dream that white children would, one day, be able to say whatever they damn well want – and that non-white people would sit there and take it.

Happily, here in Australia, that noble vision seems on the verge of coming true.

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

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Jeff Sparrow is the former editor of Overland. He is the co-author (with Jill Sparrow) of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within, the editor (with Antony Loewenstein) of Left Turn: Essays for the New Left and the author of Communism: a love story, Killing: Misadventures in violence, and Money Shot: A Journey into Censorship and Porn. On Twitter, he's @Jeff_Sparrow.